FoggyFishburne said:Yeah that's most likely gonna be the case.
Though, in that case, I hope that RED will adopt a Dark Souls approach to weapons and armour progression. In TW2, you could get the end game armour but then you could only use it for like 15 minutes. Then the game was over. That's fucking lame as shit. So I was hoping that we could continue playing after the end in TW3, just so I could savour and appreciate the end game armour there.
But, since there won't be any "metagame", I hope that RED will balance the game accordingly. The availability of equipment, outfits, etc should be easy enough to acquire early on AND that they will give us a way to ensure that they stay relevant throughout the game. Preferably through some kind of upgrade system. I wanna look badass god damnit, and I don't want to switch to a "better" armour set if the aesthetics don't appeal to me. Or vice versa and then have the game just abruptly end.
I'd say this will work in tandem with the whole 'Zero level scaling'.
If you decide you are up for a little challenge, you'll be able to go to an area that you really are much too low for & if skilled enough defeat much higher level Monsters & thus receive some reward (Quest Reward/Items for Crafting/Pattern or Item drop). This will probably be the main way of acquiring stuff before you should have it & make it so you can use something really bad-ass for a much longer period of the game.
Merely speculation, but it seems likely to me.
Also I will point out, that even though the game has "100 Hours" of Content, I doubt the game is going to stop you from just roaming about & doing whatever you want. I remember in the E3 interviews them talking about some kind of time based stuff where you will lose access to quests or events will automatically occur if you take too long to do stuff.. They haven't really brought that up again since, so I think it perhaps might not be something they're focusing on doing. I'd say you'll have your "100 Hours of Content" & then if at anytime you just want to take a break from the Plot & ride from one side of the world to the other, doing random stuff along the way, nothing is going to stop you. Which really makes a 'free-roam state' after the game ends relatively pointless, it just means you have to hold off actually finishing the game.